★★★★★
Nearly a decade since the passing of John Peel (and his very own sessions), the BBC's history in recording quality music seems a distant memory. Other than a multitude of on going orchestral recordings and Radio 1's repugnant Live Lounge - wherein mostly shit artists cover other shit artist's largely shit songs - Maida Vale isn't quite the musicians' pilgrimage the Peel Sessions would have you think it once was...
- thequietus.com
2014-01-11
★★★★★
The Purist's Fervor of 2011 may yet go down in metal history as one of its great uproars. Or something. But whereas Hunter Hunt-Hendrix had black metal isolationists busy bolting their doors and fuming with the message board fury of the ages, Wolves in the Throne Room confidently continued their lofty trajectory, standing out as exemplary crossover successes and managing to slip through the bars to craftily satisfy kvlt and n00b alike...
- www.cokemachineglow.com
2011-12-12
★★★★★
"Just like nature's theater, the group paints aural landscapes that are harsh and savage, but calm and beautiful at the same time." Oregon black-trance inducers Wolves in the Throne Room has completed the seasonal cycle with their fourth LP recording. For the Wolves clan, LP is a term that rings true in more ways than just releasing an album with several song titles. "Celestial Lineage" shows the group maintaining its tradition of releasing epic, double-digit-length tracks...
- www.metalunderground.com
2011-11-03
★★★★★
This year, black metal is having a resurgence, or at least has grown in popularity on North American shores. Portland's Agalloch and New Yorkers Lithurgy and Krallice, and to a slightly lesser extent, the awesome Tombs, have had banner years, but there's something about these Yanks that, while extremely impressive, is distinctly American and contemporary in sound...
- exclaim.ca
2011-10-17
★★★★★
Much has been made--mostly by the band itself--of Wolves In The Throne Room's hermetic existence in the arboreal wilds of Oregon. Amid the cedars, the story goes, sit brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver, communing with earth spirits and crafting ambitious, atmospheric black-metal hymns...
- www.avclub.com
2011-10-03
★★★★★
Black metal and its sassy, derivative cousins are about as "in" as they're going to get right now. It doesn't take much to recognize that the genre is expanding with formidable momentum. Arguably one of the most well-known active bands doing the black metal thang in this god-blessed land of AMURRICUH these days would have to be Wolves in the Throne Room. These dudes have taken their artistic crafting abilities to an extreme...
- www.syffal.com
2011-10-03
★★★★★
In a 2009 Show No Mercy interview with Olympia "astral black metal" band Wolves in the Throne Room, I mentioned that, as a byproduct of their relative success outside of the underground, they'd inevitably be on the receiving end of plenty of scenester backlash. (Black metal can be a strange place: at times, it's more acceptable to remain boring and unknown than be ambitious and heard.) A couple of years later, United States black metal in general is at an interesting point...
- pitchfork.com
2011-09-26
★★★★★
Wolves in the Throne Room make black metal for those who don't like black metal (which is, in theory, a hell of a lot of people). They may take some of the genre's more off-putting elements, such as the impenetrable screams and the blast beats, but these are combined with rich production (by black metal standards at least), and an image aimed more at those outside the 'scene', thanks to their beautifully designed covers and their being signed to Sunn O)))'s label Southern Lord...
- www.noripcord.com
2011-09-22
★★★★★
In a way, this fourth album by Olympia nature boys Wolves In The Throne Room might be their first release that actually sounds like what their detractors keep insisting they sound like. Not that it's diluted or weedy, far from it in fact. By the recognised standards of black metal, however, Celestial Lineage is extremely mannered, widespread in its musical reference points, more inclined to promote effeminacy than machismo and full of awe at the apparently limitless wonders of the natural world...
- drownedinsound.com
2011-09-19
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